The Night We Met
The Night We Met
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Abby Jimenez on The Night We Met
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The book that kept waiting to be readyThe Night We Met was originally scheduled as Jimenez’s 2025 release, slotted in immediately after Just for the Summer. She had already laid the groundwork, introducing Chris Wright, the pharmacist at the novel’s center, in Say You’ll Remember Me so that readers would know him by the time his story arrived. The manuscript didn’t cooperate.
I couldn’t finish it on time. It was just a too difficult of a plot. It was too much of a nuanced storyline. It needed more of my focus.
She set it aside, wrote Say You’ll Remember Me instead, and returned to Chris only once the story had the room it required.
The delay wasn’t only logistical. Chris and his love interest Larissa had been fully formed in her imagination for years before she trusted herself to put them on the page. The particular pressure she felt was about the triangle itself: the man Larissa is with when she meets Chris, Mike, had to remain someone readers understood and wanted well, not a placeholder obstacle. Writing him that way while making the central romance work was the problem she had been circling.
They’d been living rent-free in my head for years. It’s such a challenging love story, and I just didn’t feel that I was a strong enough writer yet to take on this sort of nuanced plot. It needed so much care in the development of the story because I wanted everyone to root for both Larissa and Chris.
Once she committed to the book, she was also committing to a specific emotional register she has always sought out but rarely built at this scale. The slow burn and the withheld feeling are not just generic genre pleasures to her; they are the conditions under which the story she most wants to tell becomes possible.
I love yearning. I love tension, I love slow burn, and this is just all of those things times a million.
How she wrote it
Rewriting a world that had moved on without herReturning to a partially written manuscript after publishing an intervening novel created a concrete structural problem. When Jimenez first drafted Chris’s story, Xavier, the veterinarian hero of Say You’ll Remember Me, was still single in her fictional world. By the time she came back to the manuscript, she had published an entire novel in which Xavier marries Samantha. Every scene he appeared in needed to be rebuilt.
It was a bit of a rewrite, for sure. It was definitely a bit of a rewrite to extract single Xavier out of the book and insert married Xavier into The Night We Met. But it didn’t really change too much the dynamic of the friends.
The structural challenge of rewriting Xavier’s scenes was manageable compared to the moral calibration the story required at every step. Chris and Larissa meet while she is in a committed relationship, and Jimenez had to determine precisely what those two people could say and do without betraying the reader’s trust in them. Her method for drawing that line was personal rather than theoretical.
I look inward at my own relationship and how I would feel if these things happened to me. Or to a friend — how would I want them to behave? I try to keep it as respectful as possible.
The emotional complexity of the plot required Jimenez to know her characters long before a word hit the page. Her process across all of her books begins entirely in her head: she builds the full story there, writes a synopsis for her editor, discards the synopsis, and then moves through the narrative chronologically without looking back. For a book this difficult, that prior knowledge was the thing that made writing it possible at all.
I know my characters extremely well. They exist in my mind before I put them on the page. I’m not meeting them as I’m writing them. I’m writing my stories like I’ve witnessed a love story.
The Night We Met deals with Mike’s alcoholism and depression, and the enabling dynamic that has developed between him and Chris over years of friendship. Handling that material accurately mattered to Jimenez. While the quote below was made in the context of Just for the Summer, she has applied the same practice of working with psychologists and sensitivity readers to the mental health content across her career, and the difficult territory in this book is no exception.
I always have sensitivity readers, beta readers, and advisers for my books, so I had several psychologists that helped me depict the mental health aspects of this book with accuracy.
The personal thread
Her personality, already on the pageThe Night We Met carries difficult material: grief, alcoholism, a relationship ending badly for someone who doesn’t deserve it. The humor threaded through it is not a tonal break from that weight. Jimenez has been explicit about where the blend comes from in her own life, and the answer involves her daughter.
I think my characters just experience the world in the way that I experience it. I have a chronically ill daughter, and sometimes she’s in the hospital. So we’ll make funny TikTok videos in a not-so-funny situation. You’re reading my personality on the pages.
That capacity to hold humor and pain at the same time isn’t a craft technique for her. It is closer to a position about how life actually works, one she holds consistently across books and interviews.
I think you can laugh at a funeral. Humor is weaved into the threads of everyday life no matter what’s happening to us, and that’s sort of my signature in my books.
What she wants us to sit with
Twenty years from now, still togetherFor a book built on withheld feelings and quiet acts of care spread across months of almost-conversations, the standard romantic resolution isn’t enough. Jimenez applies one specific internal test when she finishes a manuscript, and it demands more than narrative tidiness.
At the end of the book, I like to sit back and ask myself, Could I see these two together in 20 years? If I can’t, then I haven’t done my job.
For Chris and Larissa, with all the cost the book extracts to get them there, that question requires the relationship to feel genuinely earned rather than merely arrived at.
Beyond any single book, she holds a consistent standard for what the reading experience itself should do. The aspiration is modest in its framing and demanding in its specifics: she wants the book to give without taking anything away.
Most of all, I want my books to be harmless to people. I want them to entertain, and I want people to walk away feeling like they’ve learned something.
The genre’s structural guarantee, the happy ending, is not incidental to how she writes. It is the frame that makes the difficulty of books like this one bearable. She describes it as a deliberate contract with the reader: whatever she puts her characters through inside the story, they will come out the other side. Spoken about her work in general during a video appearance, she made the emotional stakes of that promise clear.
Just know that when I’m devastating you, I have also devastated myself. [paraphrased from audio]